


i come with knives

by meritmut



Series: i loved you well, when we were young [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: (as in immediately after), Blood, F/M, Light Sadism, Lokasenna, Mild Painplay, Rough Kissing, what're the appropriate tags for them beating each other up and getting off on it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 10:58:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>knives and agony to love you</p><p>has a <a href="https://8tracks.com/meritmut/trouble-maker-blood-spiller">playlist</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i come with knives

He never thinks of them as _sneaking around._ They’re not sneaking, they’re just—being discreet. _Quiet._ And it isn’t because they’re ashamed.

He’s not ashamed, anyway. How could he be, when she’s so—well, _everything_.

So why, then, does he turn to her in front of all their kith and kin, having spat in the mead of just about every guest under the roof, and say the things he does?

 

-

 

She—war, fiercest and cruellest, taker of heads, giver of no quarter—is in a fine fury tonight. They’re scarcely alone behind her chamber door when she drives her heel into his knee and sends him stumbling across the flagstones, the curl of her lip making a snarl of her beauty while he—Loki, prince viper, twist of bitten steel and cold chicanery coiled about himself like a fanged snake—would have no mercy of her anyway, refuses her the satisfaction of pleading for it as he turns with a venom of seiðr on his lips and sends her stumbling backwards, gold and caustic green dancing over her long limbs to sink like darts of ice into her skin.

Her back collides with the wall, her shoulder jostling the rack of spears and just like that a spark of silver ignites at her side, a javelin of ash and steel grasped in one hand and hurled toward him with all the force of her great strength. Loki dodges easily—it’s a distraction, nothing more, to give her the upper hand. He won't surrender it cheaply. Sif moves close but he’s moving too, anticipating her assault as the blunt force of his rising elbow connects with her face and breaks her nose with a muffled _crack_. The impact crushes her upper lip against her teeth and Sif grimaces to feel the blood well up under her searching tongue, a ripe and bloody pulse of scarlet to match the glint in Loki’s eyes.

Maybe it's only the candlelight that turns his irises that curious amber shade—maybe she’s imagining the chill surrounding him, and it’s no more than the darkness casting that wintry flush to his fingertips as he lifts one hand to wipe away the blood dripping from her nose in a motion that's almost tender, and entirely belied by the triumph in his hungry stare. But tonight is not for tenderness, and her knee is already rising to sink into his gut and send the breath skidding from his lungs and _that’s_ hot enough on her face as she shoves him back and levels her knife’s edge across his windpipe.

She’s furious, burning with humiliation in the aftermath of Ægir’s feast, with nothing of affection or care visible in the harsh lines of her face for the one who’d stung her pride and challenged her honour before the gathered gods. She can still recall the soft, sly turn to his lips when he spoke of something that had—to her, at least—been a thing too intimate to share; the cold scorn in his eyes when he boasted to one and all of what Sif herself had kept closer than a lover to her heart. It makes her sick. She hates it. Hates _him,_ and hopes he can feel it in the hard grip of her fingers at his neck.

Her short nails dig like needles, shivers skittering down his spine to feel it—feel her, an alchemy of contact and intimacy that Loki, in some secret space of his mind where even she cannot look, likens to the summoning of seiðr, to the rise of the ancient elements in sparks and surges beneath the skin before the culmination of a spell.

He’ll never _tell_ her that, mind; never let her know that she is more like magic in her brutality than the earth and thunder and rain she was made from. Not when she’s as like to slit his tongue as welcome such an observation.

(She barely cares for his opinions on a _good_ day.)

“You’re slowing,” he grits out through his teeth and it's like dry twigs snapping, the bite of it, flint and tinder ready to ignite. He _yearns_ for the flames to take them, to burn and blacken until there’s nothing left of this world but smoke, and when he breathes in it’s _her_ that fills his lungs with the sharp-edged sweetness of fire, “I’ve not been the first to score blood in a long time.”

Her eyes burn with rage and hurt and Loki watches it move through her, finding its way out of her body in the curl of her fists and the wolfish turn to her mouth when she tugs him down until their faces are so close he thinks she might put aside the blades and tear his throat out with her teeth alone—or at the very least give him a mark to wear, to remind him that he may have _claimed_ something of her tonight in front of all the gods but if she is his then he is _hers_ and that _means_ something—but then she’s shoving him away and to his knees again. Her features are hard, her mouth curved in fury and contempt, but every so often her gaze turns hot with something like hunger and Loki knows her well enough to know that part of her _lives_ for this.

And maybe she despises him, in this moment, loathes the very thought of his being so familiar with her, of knowing her inside and out as he does and accepting— _adoring_ —every wild, deviant impulse that drives her to treat him this way—but what can she do?

(What can she do, besides beat him bloody and let him meet her halfway because in this—as in so many other things—they are as one: dark mirrors, made to fit each other in ways they fit no other thing.)

She advances as he’s still regaining his balance, sinking down to pin him to the flagstones with one knee and grip his arm in a lock so tight Loki thinks she might just wrench it from its socket; it wouldn’t be the first time, they’ve done worse to one another and will again, but Sif leans close until she’s barely a breath away, her tongue a dart of pink snaking out to wet her scarlet lips and her body near enough that every part of him is alight with the heat of her.

“Think you this is a game?” she spits, giving his arm such a savage jerk that white spots erupt across his vision and he can’t choke back a whimper. “Think you I care who bleeds first? You’ll _bleed,_ liar-tongue, before I’m done.”

“Then be done,” Loki snarls, lurching up into her to capture her mouth in a swift, crushing kiss, his free hand tangling itself so tightly in the wild darkness of her hair that she grunts against his lips and _good, let it hurt,_ there’s a vicious sort of pleasure to be found in the way she twists against his grip so he grips _harder,_ revelling in the way she gasps into his kiss, the air escaping her lungs burning as it hits the back of his throat. For a heartbeat she kisses back, a moment too soft and tender for the heart of the inferno, but then she’s pulling back and dragging his arm around again, grinning into the sharp cry she tears from him as her fingers snake into his hair and make a fist.

She jerks his head back to expose the pale column of his neck, but the fatal kiss of steel upon his skin never comes.

She withdraws, instead, steps back and away from him on unsteady feet, wiping the back of her hand across her bloody mouth as she takes in the sight of him, her lover-foe, on her chamber floor. He's _so_ beautiful, to her, never more so than when he gazes up at her with her own blood and his smeared over his cheeks and his jaw and his hair so prettily dishevelled by her grip, bruised and trembling to be handled so roughly and _wild_ with the thrill of it, a fierce, wretched kind of wanting in his too-bright eyes.

Can they be tears? She’s brought him to that point before, a hundred thousand times and more; had him so slick and broken with need, overcome with desire and so wholly hers that he _sobbed_ with it as she tended to the hurts she’d caused, placed her lips along the paths her hands had mapped out in blue and purple and smoothed the sweat-matted hair back from his lovely face before she gathered him close and he slept, raw and sated and safe in the unyielding vault of her arms.

Under the weight of her narrow appraisal, Loki grins.

(If he were in her arms now, she thinks, she might be more tempted to break his neck than comfort him.)

The knife appears in her hand before he can blink, a delicate slip of steel scything through the air to leave a neat slice along his cheekbone and miss his right eye by a whisper before it clatters off the wall in a bite of metal and stone, a warning and a promise and a reminder that those who toy with the Lady Sif more often than not find themselves become toys in turn, toys without tongues or fingers and scars enough to make them wish they’d thought better of the game.

(Loki knows all this already, and though he can feel the blood warm on his cheek he never thinks better of it, never has and never will and wouldn't be Loki if he did.)

She’s coming for him again even as he moves forward to meet her and this time when she dips in close he doesn’t fight. He lets her push him backwards until his spine meets stone, one of the golden sandstone pillars that corner Sif’s chambers trapping him between a rock and a hard place. There’s nothing between _them_ but hurt; hurt and pride, fury and need, to even the score and exact her pound of flesh from him one way or another—by whatever means he'll let her, whatever means she can until she runs out of ways to make him beg forgiveness.

Her hands find his wrists and lift them above his head and his hips buck involuntarily into hers in an instinctive reaction to her closeness, one he’s never been able to fight. She seizes his mouth in another hard kiss as one hand falls to run gently—so, deceptively _gently_ —over his cheek and curve about his jaw. He can taste the blood on her lips, relishes the sharp, heady tang of it _(like her,_ he thinks), chasing it with his tongue and kissing her all the more deeply for knowing that at any moment she could tilt her head and shatter his nose in turn.

Maybe it's that knowledge that makes these moments more exhilarating, that has his veins singing with silver fire like nothing else but witching ever does, and maybe it's the awareness of what she does to him that makes Sif smile a little now.

It’s not an affectionate smile—her lips curve up against his and it feels more like the welcoming grace of cold death, but her tongue flicks out to trace the seam of his mouth and Loki knows he is forgiven for tonight, for the defect in his character that led him to the feasting hall and made him speak such poison against her.

(It wasn’t that he sought to shame her, he’ll figure out some day far from now, but that he tried to use _this_ to do it.)

Slipping his hands free from her grip Loki takes her by the shoulders and twists them, pushing her back into the pillar and ducking his head to rain icy kisses over her neck and collarbones, every now and then nipping at her golden skin with teasing bites until she moans softly and he finds himself missing her lips _desperately;_ can do nothing but lift his head to cover her mouth with his own and steal that sweet sound for himself.

It’s too easy to lose himself in the sighs he coaxes from her with lips and touch; would be easier still to get lost in _her_ when at last he is the one to push her onto her back, stretch her hands above her head as she'd done his and lazily kiss her sweet red mouth; easiest of all to grind his hips against hers when she rakes those infernal nails of hers down his back as if to mark him _mine_ , to follow the tendons in her neck with his teeth when she shudders and sighs on the verge of shattering, her body coiling taut as she rises and crests like a wave around him, her long limbs enclosing him like vines and her teeth, white and sharp as stars, sink into his lip. If it hurts he only laughs and she _revels_ in it, pushes up harder into him and kisses him so fiercely it’s as if she would tear the heart from his chest with her teeth alone, her fingertips tracing the patches of rust-red over his jaw where her own blood still lingers like rust on a blade. Her heart stains his skin: he is bruised with the things she cannot say.

(He _aches_ with all that he would say in turn.)

Her lips are a mess, and Loki traces the gory blooms with his tongue in hunger and mute apology while his hands do the same across every inch of her he can touch, until Sif shivers and whispers something that might be a hoarse exhalation of his name and—with a sharp, broken cry—comes apart beneath him, her body loosening like a bolt of silk unravelling from his hands.

She’s too quick to gather herself again, shifting them both over so that she can straddle his long thighs and lean down to press her lips in a burning trail over his collarbones, the heavy fall of her dark hair over one shoulder sweeping across his skin like the most delicate touch imaginable. He’s whimpering by the time she rises—so gracefully, so sure in her own self, and _why would she not be, look at her_ —to guide him higher up the bed. This time she needs no encouragement to lie before him, the slow curve of a smile on her face the only warning as one leg hooks around his and sends him tumbling down on top of her.

"Sif..." he splutters, unable to help himself.

The gentle pressure of a finger placed against his mouth renders him silent.

"Your silver-tongue won't save you," she mutters, red on her lips and red on her teeth and _red_ flushing her skin from her cheekbones to her chest. She leans up to brush her lips over his and Loki thinks in that moment that he will _die_ of this feeling, of the urgent press of something nameless against his ribs that threatens to break him open like clay baked too hot, and as her teeth close about his lower lip again and tug it till the blood bursts free he wants nothing more than to burn alive in the furnace of her.

"But I’ve better use for it."

**Author's Note:**

> don't look at me


End file.
